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Topic: Fedora 9 out in the wild (Read 2275 times)

After the numerous problems that the early-adopters of the so called LTS release of Ubuntu experienced, perhaps it would be a good idea to check out what the other major distros are offering, and judging from its release notes, Fedora 9 looks quite promising.

Apart from the usual enhancements that new versions of the different packages that conform the distro bring, the Fedora team decided to go wild, and adopt KDE 4 as the default KDE version in the KDE-centric variation. Another new feature that looks quite interesting if it *works* it's what they call a preupgrade tool, that in theory guarantees a seamless upgrade to the new version from Fedora 7 and upwards. We know how Ubuntu upgrades usually perform, so if the things works as advertised, they could have some advantage here. They also included experimental support for the ext4 filesystem, a welcome upgrade to the aging ext3 (now that the filesystems designed by Hans Reiser won't be updated in some time, for obvious reasons).

A more in-depth look at what's new is also available. Personally, I'm waiting for the next Mint version (which I hope does not carry the problems from its "parent" distro), but Fedora is looking more and more interesting each passing release.

I just downloaded and took a look at the Fedora 8 Xfce spin. Looks nice, played well, but I'm still skeptical of PulseAudio and I've been burned by RPM in the past.Until PulseAudio is complete and Yum can resolve dependencies as slick as Apt, it won't find a spot on my hard drive quite yet.

Ubuntu 8.04 has really shaped up since it's initial release, and to be truthful I haven't seen any of the problems others have reported.